Driving Home a Point : Boulevard of Cars Polishes Image as the Place to Buy Your Wheels

HUNTINGTON BEACH —  The banners adorn the sidewalks along Beach Boulevard from the San Diego Freeway to Yorktown Avenue.

Red, white, and blue, they flutter in the summer breeze like the battle flags of some huge military legion arranged in long lines of bright colors. Behind them is a scene as American as Orange County itself; a seemingly infinite ocean of new and used cars gleaming in the sun as far as the eye can see.

“It’s a terrific place to do business,” Clay James, president and general manager of Huntington Beach Dodge, says of the street on which his company has been doing business for several years. “There’s a phenomenal traffic flow; we get a lot of drive-by traffic.”

Said Doug Williams, general manager of nearby Terry York Ford: “The street has been very good to us.”

Welcome to Huntington Beach’s “boulevard of cars,” a three-mile stretch of highway along which 12 separate auto dealers offer no fewer than 22 makes of automobiles. As car rows go, this one is of legendary proportions. It was here that Cal Worthington filmed some of the famous late-night television commercials in which he promised to eat a bug or stand on his head in order to sell a car. Outfitted in cowboy boots and hat, the lanky car salesman was often accompanied in the segments by a leashed bear, elephant, tiger, ostrich or other animal referred to as “his dog, Spot.”

And it was here that well-known automobile pitchman Ralph Williams--general manager of what had once been a successful Ford dealership--was accused of operating one of the biggest auto fraud schemes in state history. That scandal prompted auto dealers along Beach Boulevard to form an association to improve their public image.

The street wasn’t always known as the boulevard of cars, of course.

In the 1950s it was a two-lane highway fronted mostly by cabbage and bean fields. But as the population exploded and traffic along the boulevard intensified, the resulting smog--a precursor of things to come--wreaked increasing havoc on the farmers’ crops, historians say. So the agriculturists began relocating en masse, leaving their wide-open fields to the quickest buyers. And what more appropriate buyers than the forward-looking car dealers who, attracted by the availability of the large amounts of real estate needed to conduct their businesses and the burgeoning traffic they hoped to feed, began arriving in droves by the early 1960s.

They say that timing is everything in war and business, and so it was for this new generation of entrepreneurs. As the population grew, so did the auto business, swept along on a wave of development that inexorably swallowed up the fields in favor of freeways and parking lots.

Given the huge amounts of money to be made, it was probably inevitable that the whiff of scandal would someday touch one of the businesses located along the linear auto mall that this section of Beach has become.

That finally happened in 1990 when the state attorney general’s office, acting jointly with the California Department of Motor Vehicles and the Orange County district attorney, filed a $3-million lawsuit against Friendly Ford of Huntington Beach. Included in the allegations were that the company’s salespeople and its general manager, Ralph Williams, had tricked as many as 100 customers into paying $1,000 to $5,000 extra apiece for cars by making false statements and engaging in deceptive practices during sales negotiations.

The matter was eventually settled and the defendants fined, according to Michael R. Botwin, the deputy attorney general who prosecuted the case. Friendly Ford went out of business shortly after the lawsuit was filed. Williams, a longtime resident of Texas, later declared personal bankruptcy and was forbidden to sell cars in California.

Today the onetime Ford pitchman is persona non grata along Beach Boulevard, a man whose name is seldom heard. Yet, ironically, the scandal that enveloped him contributed to a significant change among the dealers that may have a positive and lasting effect.

Three years ago, in part to overcome the adverse publicity generated by the case, the car dealers of Beach Boulevard formed the Huntington Beach Automobile Dealers Assn. One goal was to increase the dealers’ clout at City Hall and, through participation in community events, improve their public image. One of the first things the association did was dub their street the “boulevard of cars.” To help spread that moniker and increase sales, the dealers persuaded the city to aid in the construction of an 85-foot, $360,000 electric signboard on the San Diego Freeway inviting would-be car buyers to take the Beach Boulevard exit.

“We’re doing everything we can to make Beach Boulevard a very active and attractive place for the purchase of new and used cars,” explained Tom Andrusky, a spokesman for the city of Huntington Beach, which, he said, donated $100,000 toward the purchase of the sign. The rest of the money, he said, was given to the dealers in the form of a five-year loan.

“The car sales are very important because they produce sales tax,” Andrusky said. “And the people drawn onto Beach Boulevard because of the auto dealers become potential customers for all the businesses on Beach.”

Car dealers, meanwhile, believe that the sign--which went up earlier this summer and is expected to be lit in about a week --has already had a positive effect. While some dealers are still reeling from the recession, they say, others are beginning to see increased sales. And nearly all express optimism regarding the future, in part, they say, because of the strong public relations efforts--including $55,000 spent on various community promotions and activities--made by the dealers association over the past three years.

“Our approach is absolutely more aggressive and uniformed” than in the past, said Bill Demarest, general manager of DeLillo Chevrolet and chairman of the new association’s advertising committee. “It’s turned the populace’s negative thinking into positive thinking about the auto business.”

Some of that attitude seemed evident during a recent weekday meandering along the boulevard of cars.

“These guys are great,” said Mike Sattler, 25, of Westminster, ogling new cars at the Volkswagen dealership while waiting for the repair of his own older model. “My wife told me that after we get a refrigerator, dinette set and TV stand, we can buy a car,” he said. “I’ll get it here.”

And Sharon Erickson, a Huntington Beach teacher, seemed absolutely awe-struck at the seemingly endless array of shiny new Dodge vans awaiting her perusal. “I just drove by,” she said. “I knew there were (cars) on Beach Boulevard, but I didn’t know there were this many cars.”